The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [141]
This still wasn’t the end, of course, and Paul hardly knew if he was happy or relieved when Corinna sat down again at the piano, Peter withdrew to the front row and Sue Jacobs came forward, with a rather furious expression, to sing “The Hammock” by Bliss. It was strange knowing the words so well, and he tried to follow them against what seemed to him the quite pointless interference of the music. The peculiar things a singer did with words, the vowels that turned into other vowels under the strain of a high note, made it all harder and weirder. Picturing the poem, somehow written across the air, was also an escape from watching Sue herself, her bared teeth and humorous roving glare at one person after another in the audience. “And every sleeping garden flower, / Immortal in this mortal hour.” All Paul knew about Bliss was that he was the Master of the Queen’s Music, but he found it hard to imagine Her Majesty enjoying this particular offering. At the end Mrs. Jacobs got up and kissed them both, and clapped in the air to reignite the general applause. She appeared to be moved, but Paul thought he saw that under the general requirement to be so she was finding it rather a strain.
As people started talking and stood up, Paul caught Peter’s eye and comic grimace, and grinned back as if to say how marvellous he’d been. What he was actually going to say he had no idea—he dodged out to the kitchen to get a glass. When he came back and joined the group round Mrs. Jacobs he hardly dared look at him, distracted with nerves and longing and a sense of unshirkable duty about what he imagined was going to happen next.
A few minutes later they were crossing the garden, bumping lightly as they made way for each other between the tables where candles were still burning in jars; some had guttered, there was a veil of mystery, of concealed identity, over the guests who had come back out and were drinking and chatting under the stars. A cake had been cut up and was being taken round, with paper napkins. “I thought you were going to talk to the old girl all night,” said Peter.
“Sorry!”—Paul reaching for but not touching his arm.
“Now let’s see. The garden’s quite big, isn’t it.”
“Oh, it is,” said Paul. “There’s a part at the back I think we really must explore.” He felt he’d never been so witty or so terrified.
“We loved what you played!” said a woman passing them on her way back to the house.
“Oh, thank you …!”—the skein of celebrity made their little sortie more conspicuous and perhaps odd. Away from the lights now, Peter appeared both intimate and alien, a figure sensed by touch more than sight. Someone had put a Glenn Miller record on the stereogram, and the music filtered out among the trees with a tenuous air of romance. They passed the weeping beech—“Hmm, not here, I think,” said Peter, with his air, reassuring and fateful, of having a fairly clear plan.
“I think this part of the garden is most attractive.” Paul kept up the game, turning warily in the dark under the rose arch into the unkempt corner where the shed and compost were. He was speaking too as if he knew what he was doing, or was going to do. Surely it was time just to seize Peter but something about the dark kept them apart as naturally as it promised to bring them together.
He half-saw Peter fling open the shed door, with rakish impatience, and heard the clatter of canes—“Oh, shit! Oh shit …”—a sense of the shed like a booby-trap. “Mm, it’s rather